Google helps us think, Facebook finds us friends, and Pandora plays our own personalized soundtrack. It’s hard to say whether the computer algorithms that these services use to anticipate our needs ...

The word algorithm was derived from the name Al-Khwarizmi, a 9th-century Persian mathematician and author of The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. But nowadays the word most ...

Have you ever thrown around the word algorithm without knowing what it means? When people complain about the Facebook algorithm, the Netflix algorithm, or the Google search algorithm, they don’t ...

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Computer scientists often deal with abstract problems that are hard to comprehend, but an exciting new algorithm matters to anyone who ...